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User engagement with Intercom: the bold & the beautiful

When we started Addapp, we understood the importance of user engagement. We had been building and prototyping the app for more than a year together with users and their input was so valuable along the way.

It will be surprise we are getting high on getting in touch with users and getting to know them. Whether it’s to know what complaints they have, to know what they think of our ideas or to check-in whether everything is going okay with Addapp. To even asking about their personal lives if they feel like bringing personal things up.

Intercom has been our supporting partner for that all the way and we thought it would be a cool idea to share our lessons and learnings from

WIN: Stating the obvious in a less obvious way

Because of technical data constraints we can’t give new users a full Addapp experience right from the beginning, so it’s crucial that we get in touch with every new user on sign-up.
Unfortunately we can’t personally e-mail every user, so we decided to acknowledge that automatically welcome e-mails suck. But do it in a humorous way. We took it even a step further and gave users an opportunity to personally get in touch with our CEO if they just replied to the message.

FAIL: Don’t ask for permission to involve users

In the fall we’re launching new app features and before building those, we wanted feedback of long term users that often use our app. We never explicitly asked them whether we could send them our ideas for them to comment on. So we wanted to be polite and ask them if they wanted to be involved in giving us feedback on the new features.

Result: everyone opened the e-mail, but no one replied to our it, so we could as well have sent the prototypes straight away.

WIN: We’re always wrong

On a daily basis we deal with disappointed users. Whatever reason they have to be frustrated, we feel bad for ruining their mood and we’re grateful that they take the time to write down their frustrations, while they have nothing to win with it. So we apologize. We’re always wrong. The words ‘we’re so sorry’ are very powerful and change the entire conversation from a frustrated user to a user that is being heard and acknowledged.

FAIL: focus, don’t ask 5 things at once

A group of users asked ourselves to participate in giving user feedback on new ideas and prototypes. As they were so enthusiastic themselves, we decided to bombard them with all the new ideas we had and their opinion on it. Result: hardly users gave feedback and if they gave feedback, they would write a couple of lines.

We never ask users 3 things at once anymore. We show them 1 concept and ask them 1 thing about it, and we get more valuable feedback than asking 5 different things

WIN: Keep on communicating

We make it a challenge to turn negative conversations into the user agreeing to give feedback on new ideas. One day we forgot to follow-up a long e-mail from an annoyed user. He had all the reason in the world to be annoyed so we made a huge fail when we promised to follow up and never did. A couple of months later, when we noticed the screw-up, we reached out again to that user. We were very humble and took all his feedback straight to the app, showed that we cared and acknowledged the screw-up. We managed to turn the whole conversation around and now the user provides us great feedback on new ideas.